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Greg
J.
writes from USA, Sunday, July 30, 2000

Mr
Irving's opponents base their case on interpretations not
facts

I SEE your point.[*]
It seems characteristic of your opponents to make apodictic
claims about your true thoughts and motives and about the
true meanings of documents they cite, when in fact all they
have to offer are interpretations -- some of them forced.
But when you offer a straightforward interpretation of a
document and they are discomfited, suddenly they become
hermeneutically hyperscrupulous and complain that you did
not consider a host of alternate interpretations (theirs in
particular). This oscillation between aggressive
asserveration (when it hurts you) and mewling pleas for
interpretive charity (when it helps them) is something I
would expect from American lawyers or members of a high
school debate team, not from objective scholars seeking the
truth.

One particularly breathtaking misreading on your
opponents' part is the treatment of the meeting
of Hitler and Ribbentrop with Horthy on
the fate of Hungary's Jews, particularly the words of
Ribbentrop quoted on page 40, right hand column, top [of
Mr Justice Gray's Judgment].
The natural reading of this passage, it seems to me, is that
Horthy objected that taking away the Jews' livelihoods would
mean their deaths, and he was not keen on the idea of simply
killing them. (Letting them starve did not, apparently, seem
an option to the Admiral.) Ribbentrop replied that there was
an alternative to killing them: transporting them to German
concentration camps. In short, the concentration camps
(i.e., putting the Jews to work for Germany) were put
forward as an ALTERNATIVE to
killing.

Now I suspect that if this interpretation were put to
your opponents, they would immediately change their tune.
They are content to take Ribbentrop's statement at face
value when it supports their thesis. But faced with my
reading, they would probably claim that Ribbentrop was
deceiving Horthy by pretending that the camps were an
alternative to death rather than merely another means of it.
Perhaps they could actually make a case for this by looking
at further evidence--such as the overall behavior patterns
of Ribbentrop's statements and of the Nazi regime's
relationship to Horthy. But they would not feel pressed to
do this, because in their dogmatic minds, merely
contradicting their thesis is sufficient evidence of
falsehood.

This brings me to a methodological question. What could
possibly count as evidence against the exterminationist
thesis? From the evidence they cite, Hitler, Himmler,
Goebbels, et al., spoke about extracting,
expelling, rooting out, and transporting the Jews as well as
about annihilating and liquidating them. The former terms
were used more than the latter. Now, if these terms are
taken at face value, they indicate that the attitudes
regarding the final solution varied from person to person
and from time to time. There was no monolithic Nazi
consensus that the final solution was the physical
extermination of Europe's Jews. The responsible historian
would do exactly what you have: He would try to account for
this complex set of attitudes as accurately as possible. He
would try to assign responsibility to the guilty parties,
and to differentiate degress of responsibility and
culpability.

Your opponents, however, do just the opposite. Beginning
with the dogmatic assumption that there was a monolithic
consensus originating from Hitler, they take all language to
the contrary and interpret it as mere "euphemism" or "code"
for extermination. So what could change their minds? If they
were to find orders signed by Hitler that all Jewish
children were to be given milk and cookies upon their
arrival at Auschwitz,
would they simply interpret this as a particularly sick
euphemism for murder? Any behavior on the part of the Nazis
that does not cohere with the exterminationist thesis is
treated as evidence of the irrationality of the Nazis, never
as evidence of the irrationality of the exterminationist
thesis. One can prove anything, once one declares words to
mean something other than their face value! One can accept
any behavior as possible once one accepts that people are
irrational. Why not interpret liquidation and annihilation
as just brutal euphemisms for deportation?

One final point: Last night I watched MR
DEATH about the hapless Fred Leuchter. I
concluded that the filmakers were either sympathetic to
Leuchter index.html
or, if they were not, they were singularly inept at making
him look bad. I would be curious to know your reaction to
the film, and curious to know of any other reactions you
have heard.

I should point out that I am far more vulnerable
to persecution than you and Fred Leuchter, so if
you do publish my letter, please withold my name.

David Irving replies:

THOSE were exactly my reactions [to the film
Mr Death]. I heard that the original version shown at
Harvard to students as a test had the entire audience
convinced (as a poll showed) that the Holocaust had never
taken place; the producer rapidly tried to edit the film
differently, but the result is still disastrous for
Leuchter's enemies.